My companion of this morning, who happened to be of a religious turn of
mind, took the opportunity to glide off his beast and, standing a little
apart, with his arms thrown through the reins to prevent the mule from
straying, recited the dawn prayer. The noble gesticulations looked well on
that bare sandy dune, in the face of the Chott.
As for myself, I thought of the old god Triton, who dwelt in yonder foul
lake and showed some kindness to Jason, long ago, when his ships were
entangled in the ooze; I thought of Tritogeneia, the savage, mud-born
creature who, cast into the purifying crucible of Hellenic mythopoesis,
emerged as bright-eyed Athene, mother of wisdom and domestic arts. The
Amazon maidens of the country used to have combats in her honour with
sticks and stones, and the fairest of them, decked in a panoply of Grecian
armour, was conducted in a chariot about the lake. A fabled land! Here,
they say, Poseidon was born, and Gorgo and Perseus, Medusa and Pegasus and
other comely and wondrous shapes that have become familiar to us through
Greek lore.
These folks of Atlantis "saw no dreams," but they studied astronomy and
navigation; their priests may well have been those Druids whose
temple-structures, the senams and cromlechs, have wandered from the
Tripolitan frontier as far as the chilly coasts of Brittany, and Salisbury
Plain, and Ultima Thule.
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